The Summer Triangle – part 2

We now continue our tour of the famous summer triangle. Half way between the Double-Double and Deneb is a dense magnitude 9.5 open cluster identified as NGC 6819. Pretty well any telescope will reveal about 30 stars but larger instruments are required to pick up the many fainter suns. NGC 6819 is located some 7,200 light years and thought to be around 2.3 billion years old.

The Summer Triangle – part 1

The night sky is a collection of patterns known as asterisms which, when connecting the dot (stars) takes on the shape of objects, people, and animals. The larger boundaries of each asterism make up the individual constellations. The summer triangle is the connection of three bright stars from three completely different asterisms. To the far left we have the star named Deneb or the tail of Cygnus the Swan.

The Executive Director manages the daily operations of The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. This includes activities related to our charitable mandate, publications, and member service. Our current ED, Deborah Thompson has served us well, and has chosen to take a leadership role at another not-for-profit organization in a few weeks’ time. We wish her the best and thank her for nearly four years of service.

The Mighty Hercules

As the sky finally darkens well after 10 p.m. on these summer nights, plan to hunt down some great objects in the constellation Hercules. The mythological son of Zeus is positioned directly overhead and well placed for observing and photography. At first glance, the asterism stars range from magnitude 2.2 to 4.4 and looks like a crooked letter H with its left side kicked in mid way up. These main stars reside from 35 to 408 light years from us. Hercules is the fifth largest constellation in area with 1,225 square degrees of sky.

Live from the 2014 General Assembly

The 2014 Plaskett Medal Lecture

Friday, June 27, 2014

The information below comes from the RASC President, Glenn Hawley. Please take the time to read it before the Annual Meeting._________________________________________________________________________

To the RASC Membership

In this year of transition from our previous governance model, we on the Executive recognized early on that there would be some wrinkles to smooth out—many items and processes were considered in re-writing the By-Law, plus we introduced a completely new Policy Manual, and some circumstances just couldn’t be foreseen.